As I have written previously, when I first stopped drinking for a time, I could remember my past and what had happened when. After approximately 18 months of sobriety, I drank again and didn’t stop for another five or six years. When I stopped, I had lost the ability to sequence things and know when they happened. That ability has not returned.
It’s not anything as dramatic as brain damage, I’m pretty sure. It’s only during that time that I don’t have odd memories and long periods I can’t account for. The reason, I think, is that I spent those years in just about a constant state of being under the influence of alcohol, inasmuch as that was possible for me to do.
I know I was still in high school when I achieved my first prolonged period of sobriety. I stopped drinking, and I went to AA. I followed the AA program to a large degree. It will be useful for me to try to remember and delineate what was right and what went wrong. When I tell my story at a meeting, I always have in mind the chronic relapser and the person who struggles again and again and again. That was me, and I eventually got it together.
But at first, after a few false starts, I did stay sober for some time. I was so young. It’s not common to see such young people at meetings. It’s not easy to fit in when you’re that young. Unfortunately, there are even people at meetings who do not want teenage girls there. At times I was discouraged and made fun of, though rarely. In general people were wonderful, and I did speak the universal language of the suffering alcoholic. I’ve also always thought it is special and telling that although I was young and vulnerable, I was only taken advantage of once, and that was when one of the dirty old men pillars of AA society grabbed my breast. It was awful and terrible, and it was the only time someone in an AA meeting ever did something like that to me.
I was at a young people’s meeting early on, and the topic was the first step. Although I had good grades and the intelligence to earn them, I could not comprehend the concept of the first step. I said so, and there was a young woman at the meeting who gave me her phone number. She said she identified with me. I asked her to be my sponsor, and she accepted.
Elli was a driven young woman. She had about a year’s sobriety at that time. She rented a room in someone’s house, and she worked as a secretary in a lawyer’s office and was putting herself through school to become a paralegal. She had a boyfriend, Kristoffer, who probably doesn’t need any more mentioning than that. Elli was a tough sponsor, and I’m still grateful to her and for her influence on me. To be continued . . . .
